Report: The Hackett Group Finds Most HR Organizations are Slacking to Address Key Enterprise Issues

The Hackett Group is an intellectual strategic consultancy and leading enterprise benchmarking / best practices implementation firm to global companies. Their services include business transformation, enterprise performance management, working capital management, and global business services. Recently, the Hackett Group found that most HR organizations are slacking in addressing issues that are central to achieving important enterprise goals including: aligning talent strategies to business needs, implementing organizational change and dealing with critical talent and skill shortages.

According to 2017 HR Key Issues research from the Hackett Group, most HR executives recognize the potential of digital technology of the HR function, like talent management solutions, but few think their organizations have the strategies and resources required for successful execution in this area. The Hackett Group’s research found that the most critical enterprise goals that HR organizations rated themselves least able to support were:

• Adapting talent management strategies and processes to deal with changing business needs.
• Dealing with shortages of talent and critical skills.
• Implementing organizational change more effectively.
• Improving the development of agile executives who can lead effectively.
• Supporting enterprise innovation initiatives.

“Taken together, these critical development areas represent a huge deficit in the capabilities that businesses require most from HR organizations,” said The Hackett Group, Global People & HR Transformation Practice Leader Dr. Scott Leuchter. “We only see one area where more than half of all HR organizations have major initiatives underway. That’s adapting talent management, the most critical development area.”

The Hackett Group research found that many HR organizations are planning to address several major shortcomings in 2017, with  talent-related change being the most dominate objective. According to a press release, most study respondents also believe that digital technologies will fundamentally change the performance and service delivery model of HR organizations over the next few years. A large majority agree that new roles will be required and the talent and leadership needs of a business will be fundamentally altered but few believe they are prepared to deal with this.

Research spotlighted several digital technology areas where HR organizations are planning to dramatically increase their mainstream adoption efforts in the next two to three years. Nearly 80 percent of organizations expect to mainstream adoption to cloud applications and Software- as-a-Service (SaaS) within this time period. In social media and collab technologies, mainstream adoption is expected to grow to nearly 60 percent of all HR organizations. Mainstream adoption of advanced analytics is expected to grow to half of all HR organizations in the next two to three years as well.

Read The Hackett Group’s 2017 HR Key Issues research, “The CHRO Agenda: An Urgent Need to Close Large Gaps in Talent and Technology Capabilities.”